The current practice of virtual image conversion usually takes place using a vendor provided tool, which is proprietary in nature and only capable of converting other formats to the vendor's own specified format. It is a unidirectional conversion and the converted images are then configured to run on the vendor's virtualization platforms, but not vice versa. Such conversion is only sufficient in a private cloud environment as it is mainly a single vendor cloud virtual environment. However, with the emergence of the hybrid cloud infrastructure characterized by multi-vendors' heterogeneous platform, the above-mentioned private cloud infrastructure is no longer an attractive and effective option as compared to the hybrid infrastructure in terms of resources efficiency and disaster recovery considerations.
In an evolving hybrid cloud environment, image conversion across different hypervisors bi-directionally and movement of images between different cloud infrastructures are deemed necessary and important for performance optimization, operational management, and service availability considerations.